


whole lot of history

by mandaestella



Category: Actor RPF, Alexbelle, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Hunger Games (Movies), The Hunger Games (Movies) RPF
Genre: Alex is a famous musician, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Childhood Friends, F/M, gracie's birthday fic 2k19, i'm not okay basically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 10:50:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19018399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandaestella/pseuds/mandaestella
Summary: isabelle and alex were best friends growing up. they spent every single day together for the first sixteen years of their life. that was why it was so shocking when one day alex just disappeared with no explanation, no apology, and no goodbye. but now he’s back, a successful rock star with sold-out tours and three albums under his belt. and there’s no way in hell isabelle wants anything to do with him.





	whole lot of history

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sithclove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sithclove/gifts).



> if there are two things gracie loves it is a childhood friends au and alexander ludwig, so for her birthday i decided to put them together. thank you for being my motivation, laughter, light, and soulmate. happy birthday; i'll love you till the sun dies and i'll see you SOON.
> 
> big shout out to emily who listened to me scream about this for two straight weeks, for helping me untangle plot points, for loving these characters as much as i do, and for supporting everything i do even when it's slightly insane.

_We were young and we were laughing, we didn’t know that time was passing us_   
_We were dreamers with starry eyes, singing songs on the steps outside_   
_But then I had to understand that sometimes life will take you by the hand_   
_But I still think about how we used to dream, we were young at heart, we used to sing_   
_Ba Ba Ra by The National Parks_

Isabelle grew up with Alexander Ludwig. They had been born three days apart. Their families were next door neighbors. Their mothers were best friends; their fathers were best friends; their siblings were best friends. It only made sense that the two of them would be thicker than thieves from the moment they could communicate that fact.

All of Isabelle’s earliest memories involved Alex. She remembered Alex tackling her into a pile of candy spilling from a broken pinata at their fifth birthday party. She remembered sledding down the big hill behind the elementary school across the street from their houses. She remembered summers at the lake, Alex patiently spending hours when they were twelve, teaching her how to wakeboard even though there was no chance in hell she was ever going to get it figured out. She remembered when Alex got his first guitar at thirteen, that they would sit in the backyard on balmy summer nights as he came up with new chord progressions that eventually turned into songs.

And then they were starting high school together. Their lockers were right next to each other; they sat in the cafeteria together; they went to football games and pep rallies and dances together. You couldn’t ever see one without the other; it got to the point where the first question people asked Isabelle if they saw her by herself was “where’s Alex?”

They made plans for what they would do after high school, even when they were thirteen years old and adulthood seemed like a speck far off in the distance. They were going to move to Los Angeles or New York or Atlanta, somewhere far away from the tiny town in the Midwest where they grew up. They were going to be a dream team.

Plain and simple, he was her best friend, the person she told all of her secrets to, the one she ran to when she got a bad grade or the guy she liked didn’t pay any attention to her in world history, the first one she told when she made the soccer team, the one who was always there, cheering her on, supporting her no matter what. He knew everything about her: from what she wanted to do when she grew up to what she was scared of to her favorite color and song and movie and food. And she knew everything about him.

Or so she thought.

When Isabelle was five, she wanted to be a princess. When she was ten, she wanted to be a veterinarian. When she was fifteen, she wanted to be a journalist. But for as long as she could remember, Alex had wanted to be a musician, a songwriter, a rock star. He had never changed his mind, never wavered, spent every spare second of the day writing songs and playing around on his guitar until he was really good. Every part of his life revolved around music: he played guitar in orchestra and messed around with his friends in a tiny garage band and CDs littered every surface of his room, his computer always open to Spotify and his nightstand overflowing with notebooks filled with half-completed songs.

After everything had happened, she kept going back to one conversation, replaying it in her head and wondering if she should have known better.

They had been lying on their backs under the willow tree in Isabelle’s backyard the night before school started, completely shielded from the world. When they were younger, they had pretended that this was their own secret clubhouse, that no one could find them in there because they were protected from the world. They used to get put in timeout for refusing to let Madeline or Nick or Natalie join them, not caring as long as they were put in timeout together.

And it was under that tree that Isabelle told Alex she loved him for the first time.

She had known for a while, but she hadn’t known that she had known until recently. They were just about to start their junior year of high school, were gearing up to turn seventeen and get their driver’s licenses and take their PSATs and start applying to colleges. Their plans still hadn’t changed; they were going to go somewhere far away and they were going to be together.

But it seemed like one day, Isabelle woke up and started looking at Alex differently. Instead of seeing him as her brother or her best friend, she saw him as someone else, someone she wanted to be with, someone she wanted to be able to call her boyfriend. And because Isabelle was Isabelle and Alex was Alex, she knew that she would be able to just tell him that with no awkwardness or hesitation.

Alex was facing her, lying on his side on the thick carpet of grass, cool from being under the shade of the tree even though it had been an incredibly hot day, the air thick and suffocating. “I have to tell you something,” Isabelle said, fiddling with the friendship bracelet on her wrist that Alex had tied there when they were fourteen years old and that she had never taken off.

“Okay,” Alex said, reaching out and hooking his finger under her bracelet like he always did when she was messing with it. He was always telling her that she was going to break it if she kept doing that. “I’m all ears.”

“I love you,” she said, the words slipping out of her mouth easily. She had said those words before to the dumb baseball player she had dated for the first half of sophomore year before she found out that he was cheating on her with one of the cheerleaders. She knew that this felt different than that, and that gave her the confidence that she was right this time. “Not just as my friend, but you know… as more than that.”

Silence fell between them, but it was a comfortable one, the kind that only two people who had been best friends their entire lives could understand. “Are you sure?” Alex asked finally. “That you feel that way?”

“Yes,” Isabelle said simply. “Absolutely.”

That was the moment their relationship changed, Alex rolling closer to her and tipping her chin towards him, kissing her. It was hesitant at first, but Isabelle could feel his mouth curve into a smile against hers, and it seemed silly that they had waited this long for this moment. She went to bed that night on cloud nine, her head full of Alex and his smell wrapped around her like a blanket. She didn’t know what was going to happen next, assumed that they would start dating but knew that they didn’t have to talk about things the same way other people did. They would figure it out.

Isabelle couldn’t wait to wake up the next morning, jumping out of bed as soon as her first alarm rang. She had never been a morning person, had to set four separate alarms in order to get out of the house on time, but today was different. Madeline narrowed her eyes at Isabelle as she came into the kitchen, grabbing the box of Lucky Charms from the middle of the table and dumping a heaping serving into a bowl, pulling the milk towards her.

“What’s wrong with you?” Madeline asked, mouth full of cereal.

“What?”

“Normally you’re all pouty in the morning,” Madeline pointed out, and Isabelle just rolled her eyes.

“Nothing. Just excited for the day.”

“What the fuck have you done with my sister?”

“Language,” their mom called from upstairs, proving yet again that she saw and heard everything, no matter where she was.

“I’m fine,” Isabelle said, wanting to keep her night a secret for now, just between her and Alex. She wolfed down her breakfast as fast as she could, grabbing her backpack from the cubby by the front door which was clean for now but would soon become a dumping ground for loose papers and winter coats and gym bags as the year went on. “I’ll meet you over at the Ludwigs, okay?”

“Whatever, you freak!” Madeline called after her as she shut the door behind her.

The air felt cooler than it had in a long time; maybe summer was finally breaking, turning into fall. She made the seventy-seven steps from her front door to Alex’s quickly, her heart beating out of her chest. They had walked to school together every single morning since kindergarten; that was going to change now.

Natalie opened the door before she even knocked on it, her backpack on and Alex’s worn-out Brewers hat settled on her head. “You ready?”

“Yeah.” Isabelle looked behind her into the brightness of the house. “Is Alex almost ready?”

Natalie stopped in her tracks, in the middle of shutting the door, her hand frozen on the knob. “He didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

Of all the things that quickly ran through Isabelle’s mind, the cold hard truth wasn’t one of them. She thought maybe he was running late or that he had gone to school early to dump his guitar in the music room and suck up to the band director.

“He left,” Natalie said simply, like this wasn’t shocking to Isabelle, like she had any idea what the hell was going on.

“For school?”

“No.” Natalie gave her a look, suddenly realizing that Isabelle had no clue. “To Los Angeles. For The X Factor.”

“What?”

“Isabelle…” she said simply. “He’s gone.”

_We were young, I used my paper telescope to show you the stars_   
_And then win your heart, how could we ever make believe_   
_I can see, I can see, I can see a sunrise_   
_Call me out from the dark cause I’m broken inside_   
_Make This Leap by The Hunts_

Isabelle didn’t realize until later that Alex had never said I love you back.

“What?” she asked Natalie again. Natalie looked behind her, Nick and Sophia pushing past them and saying hello to Isabelle like this was a totally normal morning, like she hadn’t just had a bomb dropped in the middle of her life. Alex’s mom appeared, wooden spoon in one hand, mixing bowl cradled in the crook of her arm, looking like the picture of suburbia, and Isabelle honestly didn’t understand why everyone was going around acting like something horrible wasn’t happening.

“Isabelle,” she said soothingly. “Why don’t you come in for a second?”

She had been in the Ludwig house about ten million times at this point in her life; she had sat at the kitchen table studying for finals and played Mario Kart in the den with Natalie and Nick and Sophia and Alex, passing controllers back and forth and yelling at each other. They had built the world’s sketchiest treehouse in the backyard when they were eleven, Alex insisting that he knew how to use a hammer even as he bashed himself in the hand. Isabelle had buried Alex’s Batman action figure in the backyard when she was mad at him for an almost instantly forgotten reason when they were about nine years old. Every memory she had here was tied to Alex.

“I thought…” His mom sank down next to her, dropping the spoon into the bowl and setting it aside. “He said he had told you everything. He said that last night he was saying goodbye.”

“What’s going on?” She tried to keep her voice steady, failing miserably.

“Isabelle.” His mom put her hand over hers. “A few months ago, Alex auditioned for The X Factor. We all thought it was a long shot, but he ended up moving on.” So many words were jumping out at Isabelle that she couldn’t keep them all straight: months, audition, X Factor, we all, long shot.

“I…” She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. “When? When did he audition?”

Sharlene cleared her throat. “June.”

June? Was she kidding? It was September. Now that Isabelle thought back, she remembered the trip that Alex had taken to Chicago, saying that his dad had a work conference and he was going to tag along for a couple of days.

Alex had never lied to her before, but this was a pretty big secret to keep.

“And he… he made it.” She was trying to piece everything together, knew it wasn’t as complicated as she was making it, but it just wouldn’t fit together in her head. This was not the Alex she knew. This was not the Alex she loved. They had never hidden anything from each other. He wouldn’t just leave without saying goodbye.

“To the next stage, yes,” Sharlene said simply. “He left today to go to boot camp.” She cocked her head to the side, a look on her face of worry or concern or maybe just plain and simple confusion. “He really didn’t mention it to you?”

“No,” Isabelle said faintly. She might pass out. “Not a word.”

She left the house in a daze, somehow put one foot in front of the other long enough to make it to school. As usual, everyone asked her where Alex was, but she couldn’t answer, couldn’t get the words to come out of her throat because maybe if she refused to say them out loud then they wouldn’t be true. She sleep walked her way through Spanish and British Literature and Physics and the first day of school assembly, finally breaking free at three o’clock and racing back to her house.

Both of her parents were still at work and Madeline was at cheer practice, so she blessedly had the house to herself. She had come up with a plan of action in Calculus, scrawling down notes on some spare graph paper. She was going to call Alex, had a list of questions to ask him, and she was going to tell him that it was fine that he had hid it from her. She understood him, knew that he was terrified of failure and wanted more than anything to find himself, to be who he thought he should be, to make it. Those weren’t easy emotions to express. And she was going to tell him that she still loved him, that she would be here waiting whenever he got back.

But she couldn’t tell him any of that because when she called him, his phone went straight to voicemail.

Okay. That was fine. No big deal. Maybe he was still on the plane. Maybe he was in a meeting. Maybe his phone had died and he had fallen asleep in a hotel room. There were plenty of rational reasons for why he wouldn’t be answering. She typed out a long text, erasing it all and just writing “call me. miss you” before sending it. And she put her phone face down on the bed and waited, resisting the urge to check it every five minutes.

She made it through a mountain of reading for Government (who assigned reading on the first day of school?), family dinner, and two episodes of Parks and Recs before she finally broke, leaving Madeline in the living room and racing upstairs to retrieve her phone from where it was plugged in by the bed. She had barely even had a chance to flip it over before she hit the home button, the screen lighting up.

She had a couple of texts from Natalie, one from Sophia, and nothing from Alex.

Isabelle was trying her damnedest not to panic, but she was not succeeding. Almost by reflex, she went to check his Instagram, her heart dropping to her knees when she saw the little pink and orange circle around his profile picture, indicating that he had a new story up. Half of her didn’t even want to look at it, but the other half won out and she clicked on it.

There were a few, the dashes running across the top of her phone screen and each one making her heart sink a little lower. The first one was the view of Los Angeles from the window of a plane, low over the buildings and palm trees and roads. The next two were of a spacious hotel room, all bright white and sharp edges. And the fourth was of Alex himself, taking a selfie in front of the Walk of Fame. She hit the home button, pulling up her list of favorites and calling Alex again. Straight to voicemail. She locked her phone quickly, dropping it on her pillow as her knees gave out and she fell down onto the bed.

Clearly, his phone was working. She wasn’t an idiot. She knew that if you got sent straight to voicemail, it was because you were blocked.

Isabelle had to know the truth, knew that sitting around wondering what was going on would be more torturous than having an actual answer, even if it wasn’t one that she liked. So she went downstairs, grabbing Madeline’s phone off the couch even as her sister was asking her what the hell was going on and why she looked sick.

Isabelle had never had a panic attack before, didn’t know what it felt like, but she was breathing so fast that she essentially wasn’t getting any air at all and her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped Madeline’s phone straight to the hardwood floor. Picking it up, she dialed Alex’s number, didn’t bother to search for it in her sister’s contacts because she knew it by heart, and when it started ringing, she hung up quickly, throwing the phone down and sprinting out of the room because she was absolutely, positively, one hundred percent going to throw up.

_Promise again that I would call her, forget the time cause I’m seven hours behind_   
_It’s probably good I didn’t call though, but I always want to_   
_And I’d beg you but you know I’m never home and I love you but I need another year alone_   
_7 by Catfish and the Bottlemen_

She never heard from Alex again.

If you had told her when she was sixteen or fifteen or ten or five or at any other point in her life that this would be the end to their story, she wouldn’t have believed it for a second. Not for one second. Not her and Alex. They were better than that.

Except they weren’t.

She kept up with him of course. It wasn’t hard. After Alex won The X Factor, he was everywhere, plastered all over the newspaper in their tiny home town and in magazines everywhere else. He was on Entertainment Tonight and TMZ and E! News every night. He was constantly trending on Twitter. He gained seventeen million followers in a matter of months. He was famous now, really, truly, properly famous, and Isabelle had no idea who he was anymore.

He was signed to Syco, and his first album came out just a few months after the show aired, which she refused to watch, barricading herself in her room every Tuesday night. It was full of songs about first love and parties and girls, and Isabelle couldn’t listen to more than a few seconds of it without her stomach twisting itself into a knot. He went on tour for the first time, opening for Ed Sheeran, and Isabelle tried as hard as she could not to follow his every move on Instagram.

Isabelle got her driver’s license. She turned seventeen. Madeline left for college, halfway across the country, and Isabelle went out to see her a few times. She got accepted to Northwestern, her first choice school. She turned eighteen, and she graduated high school. Never in a million years would she have thought that she would do all of those things without Alex, but apparently life never turned out how you planned it.

Alex’s second album dropped a couple of years later, more mellow and acoustic than the first. Everyone wanted to work with him; he was one of the biggest names in the music business. He had his first headlining tour, coming to Chicago, and even though all of the Ludwigs and Fuhrmans went, even though it was in the city where she lived, she didn’t go, sitting in her dorm room and blasting Nickelback like it was still 2007 and none of this had happened.

Then he took a break for a couple of years, not releasing any new songs on his own but doing a couple of singles with Taylor Swift and Zedd and Bebe Rexha. He certainly wasn’t laying low in his personal life, photographed out at the club every night with his new girlfriend, Riley Rae Ritter, who was a porn star as far as Isabelle could tell from stalking her on Twitter.

He wasn’t Alex anymore; he was Alexander. He wore a twenty-five thousand dollar watch and drove a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar car and owned a mansion with Riley Rae Ritter in the canyon. Judging from his Instagram posts, they had a couple of dogs, more money than they knew what to do with, and a clear pathway in front of them to an engagement. From the outside looking in, which Isabelle had been for nine years now, everything seemed perfect. He was living the life that so many people dreamed about.

Isabelle, on the other hand, hadn’t done anything perfectly. Sure, she had gotten into a good school. But then she had dropped out her junior year. She couldn’t exactly explain why; it had always been expected that she go to college. Except for Madeline, no one else in her family had gone, choosing instead to stay in their hometown and open up a bakery. They wanted her to get out. They wanted more for her.

But she had ended up right back at home, right back at the bakery, nothing changed except for the twenty thousand dollars of student loans looming over her head, and that was fine. She was fine. She didn’t want anything more than that. That’s what she kept saying at least, and sometimes she believed it. Isabelle had gotten very good at lying to herself.

Alex’s third album came out last year, and it was darker, older, more angst-ridden, the second single titled “I Will Let You Down.” Even so, it was the second biggest shock of her life, save for him leaving, when she woke up one morning, went on Twitter like she always did, and saw that he had checked himself into rehab.

Over the last couple of years, Isabelle tried to check up on Alex less. But it seemed like every time she went on Twitter, he was doing something new. She wasn’t following him, of course, but it was impossible not to see it. All of her childhood friends claimed Alex, acting like they still knew him or like they had been friends with him a decade ago. And the Ludwigs were still her parents’ best friends. She would never be able to get away from him.

And when he went to rehab, the internet really blew up, everyone discussing his actions, voicing their opinion, making comments that Isabelle knew even now were tearing Alex to pieces. If there was one thing Isabelle remembered about Alex, it was that he really cared what people thought about him. He would have hated all of this.

His camp had tried to keep things as quiet as possible, but news leaked anyways. There were paparazzi pictures of Alex at the airport the day he left for Utah, his hood pulled over his head, sunglasses covering his face, head low and Beats slung around his neck. She couldn’t see his eyes, but he didn’t look like himself. Riley Rae Ritter was clinging onto his arm, looking straight at the camera in most of the photos. Isabelle studied them, leaning over her laptop at the counter of the bakery when it was slow, trying to figure out who he was now.

He ended up at Cirque Lodge in Sundance, Utah, the same place Lindsay Lohan and Mary-Kate Olsen and Eva Mendes had gone to. They specialized in drug and alcohol addiction, and Isabelle spent hours and hours wondering what Alex had a problem with, whether it was alcohol or cocaine or amphetamines. It didn’t matter, but for some reason it was the number one question in his mind. And for ninety days, his social media went dark, nothing new posted, no updates or paparazzi pictures or articles. Every once in a while, Riley Rae Ritter tweeted something about how much she missed him, posted photos at their mansion of their dogs and their pool and their life without him in it.

She spent more time trying to figure out what had happened while he was at rehab than at any other point in his life, starting with the single he had done with Taylor Swift, released just before his third album dropped. It was called The Last Time, and every single line of it made Isabelle worry for him. This is the last time you tell me I’ve got it wrong. This is the last time I say it’s been you all along. This is the last time I let you in my door. This is the last time I won’t hurt you anymore.

His album didn’t make her feel any better. It was full of lyrics like “won’t you help me sober up / growing up it made me numb / and I want to feel something again” and “I got no excuses for all of these goodbyes / call me when it’s over cause I’m dying inside” and “I don’t regret this life I chose for me / but these places and these faces are getting old.”

He was spotted at the airport ninety-one days after he had left, the pictures circulating all over the internet. Isabelle spent a long time looking at those too, noting that he looked better than ever, healthy and tan and muscular again, not the pale skinny guy who had been photographed three months earlier. Whatever rehab had done for him, it sure seemed like a good thing. But what did she know?

And now, a couple of months later, they were twenty-six years old, ten years removed from the last time they had seen each other. It hadn’t gotten any easier for Isabelle, and there wasn’t a day that went by where she didn’t think about Alex, even if it was only for moment. She had been back at the bakery for six years, back at home, and her life was fine. But it wasn’t what she had wanted. None of this was what she had wanted.

Still, she lived her life, went on dates and opened the bakery every morning and thought about moving away, thought about doing something else, anything else. But something kept her tied to the town. She didn’t know what it was, just had a feeling that she couldn’t leave.

And then Alex came back.

_Hello, hello, I’m not where I’m supposed to be_   
_I hope that you’re missing me cause it makes me feel young_   
_Hello, hello, last time that I saw your face was recess in second grade_   
_And it made me feel young_   
_Sober Up by AJR_

As far as Isabelle knew, he had left at sixteen and never come back. His family went out to visit him at least once a year, and they saw him when he came close for tours, but he hadn’t set foot in their town in ten years.

At first, she didn’t know he was back, and when she looked back on those first few blissful moments, she couldn’t decide if she would have rather it stayed that way. But it didn’t; of course it didn’t. She saw a couple of tweets from people stating that they saw Alex in town. She ignored them; there was always someone who thought they saw him lurking around. But then she saw even more tweets, plus some photos he was tagged in by fans on Instagram, the geotag clearly stating Muskego.

And then Natalie called her, already breathless when Isabelle answered the phone. Unlike Isabelle, Natalie had graduated from college, and she worked and lived about thirty minutes away in Milwaukee. Isabelle saw her a couple of times a month, meeting up for dinner or coffee on the weekends, talking about everything but the obvious.

“Isabelle.” Natalie’s words came out in a rush, not giving Isabelle the time to say anything. “Listen, I don’t know if you have seen or heard anything yet, but I wanted to call you right away to tell you because Alex is back in town and here’s the thing, I would have told you sooner if I had known any sooner and I didn’t, so I’m super sorry about that but-”

“Nat.” Isabelle cut her off before she passed out from lack of air. “It’s cool. I already saw it.” Her voice was deceptively calm; over the years she had gotten really good at pretending like she didn’t care what Alex was doing. She wasn’t sixteen anymore, that was for sure. She’d had a decade of practice. “It’s cool. I saw it on Twitter.” And Instagram. And Facebook. And the Google alert she had set for him. Not that she was going to tell Natalie any of that. “Is he… is he staying with your parents?”

“Yes,” Natalie said hesitantly, and Isabelle knew her well enough to recognize the tension laced beneath her words. “Is that okay?”

Isabelle still lived with her parents, was still sleeping in her childhood bedroom and eating breakfast in the same kitchen that she had when she was in high school and middle school and elementary school. And the Ludwigs still lived right next door. Avoiding Alex wouldn’t be an option, although she had been running the scenarios through her brain since the second she realized he was back and she didn’t know what would be worse: running into him or not running into him.

“Come on, Nat. What am I going to do, tell him to leave? Tell him he can’t see his family? It’s fine.”

Natalie spent a few more minutes asking Isabelle if she was really okay, Isabelle assuring her over and over that yes, she was fine; no, she wasn’t mad; sure, she would see her later, just text her when she made it into town. But when Natalie hung up and Isabelle sat down on her bed, all she could do was cry.

She had thought a lot about what she would do if she ever ran into Alex again. In her mind, he apologized. In her mind, he came to her first. In her mind, he made up for a decade of hurt and tears and questions in a few moments. None of those scenarios involved her being twenty-six years old and still stuck in the same town they grew up in.

For the next couple of days, Isabelle tried to remain unseen; thankfully, she had to be at the bakery every morning at four o’clock to get it ready to open, so there was no chance of Alex seeing her then. When she left at one in the afternoon, she took the long way home, cutting through the woods behind their houses to get to the door on the side of the house, as far away from the Ludwigs as she could manage. And for a few days, it seemed to be working.

Count on Madeline to ruin all of her anonymity in one fell swoop.

“We’re doing what now?” she snapped. Madeline had come home from Chicago for the weekend, burst into Isabelle’s room and woke her up, which already made her cranky enough. The next words out of Madeline’s mouth made her even crankier. “They’re all coming over?”

“For dinner,” Madeline said breezily, like she wasn’t in the process of completely ruining Isabelle’s life. “Tonight.”

Isabelle sat up, grabbing her phone off the nightstand. It was two o’clock; she had only been home from work and asleep for about thirty minutes. Even so, having only four hours to prepare herself to see Alex wasn’t nearly enough time; four years wouldn’t be enough time. “And you’re just telling me this now?” she sat up, pushing her blankets off and stomping past Madeline to the bathroom, turning the shower on and slamming the door behind her.

Unfortunately, the door didn’t lock; her dad had taken it off when Alex had somehow locked her in there when they were about nine. He alleged that it was an accident, but Isabelle wasn’t so sure. She had just gotten in the shower when she heard the doorknob click and the door open.

“Isabelle,” Madeline said softly, so quietly that Isabelle could barely hear her over the sound of the water. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Her answer came too quickly. “I’m good.”

“You’re not.” There was no question about it. Madeline had known her for her entire life, and she was a marriage and family therapist. If there was anyone who could accurately tell Isabelle how she was feeling, it was Madeline.

“Well, what can I do?” she asked through the shower curtain. “Just have to get through it.”

“It’s not going to be as bad as you’re thinking.”

“No, it’s going to be much worse.”

“I’ll be right there the entire time,” Madeline said firmly. “I won’t leave your side, I promise.”

Isabelle thought about that for a couple of seconds. If she had to see Alex, this was probably the best setting she could do it in: not alone with him, surrounded by her family, in her own house where she could escape if she needed to. And it would only be for a couple of hours. In the grand scheme of things, it could be much worse.

Even so, she texted Jackie the second she got out of the shower, telling her to come over as soon as she could. Jackie was her best friend, did the books for the bakery and sat with Isabelle on slow days, perched on the counter reading a book. She had moved to town just a couple of years ago, a fresh business degree in hand and a longing to live in a small town, something Isabelle would never understand, although she was exceedingly grateful that all of the decisions Jackie had made in her life brought her here.

Jackie came barreling through the door just five minutes later; she lived in the apartment over the bakery which was just a couple of blocks away. “What’s going on?” she asked breathlessly, Isabelle barely managing to pull her shirt over her head before the door slammed open. Isabelle filled in her quickly, and Jackie was indignant on her behalf. Secretly, Isabelle was glad for her reaction; she wanted someone to feel just a fraction of what she was feeling.

Obviously, Jackie hadn’t been around for the Alex debacle, but she knew about it, had heard bits and pieces and put it all together over the years. She was the one who consoled Isabelle when she got drunk and cried about what could have been; she was the one who said snarky things about Riley Rae Ritter when a new picture popped up on Instagram; she was the one who assured Isabelle that she was strong and independent, that she didn’t need him or his validation. And above all, she was the one who always told Isabelle that no matter where she was in life or what she was doing, she was successful and smart and strong.

Without Jackie, she would be lost.

“What can I do?” Jackie asked, plopping down on Isabelle’s bed and leaning up against the wall, looking at all of the pictures pinned up over the head of her bed. There were gaping spaces that Isabelle had tried to fill in over the years, but even now it was just a reminder of the hole that Alex had left in her life when he disappeared.

“Nothing.” Isabelle turned toward the mirror, grabbing a brush and beginning the long process of untangling her hair. “Just having you here is enough.”

_I’m a little bit home but I’m not there yet, it’s one to forgive but it’s hard to forget_   
_Don’t call me, I won’t call you too, let’s just call it over_   
_All the broken hearts in the world still beat, let’s not make it harder than it has to be_   
_Girls Chase Boys by Ingrid Michaelson_

She had never had a panic attack before, but she was convinced she was having one now.

It was five to six, and she had just heard the doorbell ring, but she couldn’t get herself to move from where she was planted in the middle of the room. She was dressed; her hair and makeup were done; by all counts she was ready to just walk down the stairs and face the music, but she couldn’t take a step forward. She pressed a palm flat to her chest, feeling her heart beating underneath her skin, and she tried to take a deep breath, drawing it in shakily.

“Isabelle!” her mom called from the bottom of the stairs, and she could picture her standing there with her arm propped on the railing, looking up. What she couldn’t picture in her mind was Alex standing behind her, just like he had every morning when he came to get her for school. “Jackie!”

“Coming!” Jackie chirped, stepping in front of Isabelle and turning towards her, putting her hands on Isabelle’s shoulders and steadying her. “Let’s do this. Deep breath.” She waited for Isabelle to pull another breath in, fixing a piece of hair by her face. “And let’s go.”

Jackie was in front of her going down the stairs, her heart pounding faster with every step, but the entryway was empty, as was the living room and the dining room and the kitchen, and Isabelle knew everyone was out in the backyard. Through the sliding glass door she caught a glimpse of the icy blonde of Natalie’s hair, of Madeline’s shoulder, of the fire flickering in the fire pit.

The backyard was her parents’ pride and joy. They had redone it a couple of years ago, added a big stone fire pit and twinkling lights draped overhead and a shiny grill, the willow tree framing everything in the background. Isabelle had always loved the backyard, spent most of her summer nights sitting on a wooden deck chair so old that the wood felt soft under her legs. And now it was going to be the spot that she passed out in front of her old best friend and his entire family.

Jackie kept a firm grip on her arm as they passed through the kitchen, out onto the porch, and down the couple of steps to the backyard. Isabelle kept her eyes trained on the ground, convinced that she was going to slip and fall or do something to embarrass herself.

A horrific thought suddenly crossed her mind, and she realized that in the last few days she hadn’t thought at all about the fact that he might have brought Riley Rae Ritter home with him. But finally she forced herself to look up, and even though she tried to act normal, she knew her eyes went straight to Alex.

He was standing on the far side of the fire, hands shoved in his pocket, chewing on his bottom lip, and he was looking right at her, his eyes lit up by the flames flickering in front of him. He didn’t look like the sixteen year old kid who had left here ten years ago. He was a man now, big and different and as gorgeous as ever. Seeing him on Instagram and Twitter and in magazines and on television was nothing compared to having him right here in front of her; there was such a deepness behind his eyes that she couldn’t read, something the pictures of him had never picked up.

Isabelle couldn’t breathe.

Thankfully she was saved, Alex’s parents coming around the fire to give her a hug, Natalie and Nick and Sophia close behind. Even though she lived next door, she rarely saw his parents, choosing to live a life of avoidance whenever possible, and his siblings were scattered around Wisconsin, coming home only every once and while, save for Natalie. She used the moment to break her eye contact with Alex, but she could tell he was still staring at her, could feel it in the heat on the side of her face that wasn’t just coming from the fire.

They had always been able to read each other’s minds, always been able to communicate without speaking. That’s what happened when you grew up together, spent every second of every minute of every hour together. Isabelle had wondered many times whether they had lost that, but she realizing the moment she saw him that it was still there. She knew he was nervous too.

The hellos passed by too quickly, Isabelle fast approaching the end of the line with Sophia, realizing that she had inadvertently moved around the edge of the circle, closer to Alex, as she went down the line of Ludwigs. He was standing right in front of her, close enough for her to touch, close enough for her to see the faint lines in his forehead and the scruff of his beard and the way he was twisting his hands in his sweatshirt pockets the way he always did when he was nervous.

She wanted to hug him too, but didn’t know how, felt like she couldn’t move. Behind her, she could hear Jackie introducing herself to Alex’s siblings, everyone chatting away like her world wasn’t moving on its axis.

When they were about fifteen, Isabelle had overheard her mom and Sharlene talking in the kitchen, cups of coffee in front of them. They thought Isabelle and Alex had gone to the pool, hadn’t realized that Isabelle had forgotten her sunglasses and come back to grab them.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they got married one day,” Sharlene said.

“You think?”

“You see how Alex looks at her, right?” That was when Isabelle realized they were talking about her.

“Like she’s the center of his universe.”

“Exactly,” Sharlene said, and there was a pause as she took a sip of her coffee. “For him, the earth revolves around her.”

“Well,” her mom said. “I couldn’t ask for better future in-laws.” They both laughed, and Isabelle let herself out the front door as quietly as she could. For the rest of the summer, she caught Alex looking at her just as Sharlene had described, training his eyes on her at the top of the water slide or from across the dinner table or from the middle of the lake as she got a tan on the dock. She was his universe.

She thought about that now, swallowing noticeably. And finally, he said something. “Hey.”

His voice was deep and rough, the product of adulthood and cigarettes and loss, and something in her chest felt like it broke. “Hey,” she said back. It was a start at least.

And then Alex pulled his hands out of his pockets, moving towards her and hugging her tentatively. As his arms went around her, she pushed her anger and sadness and hurt aside, closing her eyes and smelling him around her, pulled back suddenly to the night before he left, the night she told him that she loved him. She hugged him back softly, feeling like he might disappear from right underneath her.

She pulled back first, taking a step back so she could look at him. “How are you?” The words seemed so wildly inadequate, couldn’t encompass all the years and secrets between them, but she didn’t know where else to start.

“I’m okay,” he said. Alex had never been the type of person to see he was fine as a reflex if he wasn’t actually fine. He was a writer, through and through, and he truly believed that every word meant something, even if you didn’t know what it was yet. He tipped his head to the side, his eyes trained on hers. “And you?”

She nodded. “Good. I’ve been good.” Isabelle, on the other hand, had no problem lying about how she felt.

_And I know that I said I would always be your friend_   
_But I guess that you used all your chances in the end_   
_So fuck you for wasting my time, fuck you for everything_   
_FU4E by Lost Kings_

Lying in bed that night after the Ludwigs had left, Isabelle realized how incredibly fucking angry she was.

Sure, it was probably hurt disguising itself as anger, but knowing that fact didn’t make her feel any less furious.

He had left her. No explanation, no goodbye, no common courtesy of a phone call or a text. He had blocked her from everything. He hadn’t spoken to her in a decade. He had never apologized. He had never explained anything. He had never given her anything to hold onto. She had tried to move forward, tried to go on with her life, but without closure it was impossible.

She rolled over in bed, grabbing her phone and going to his Instagram. She had looked at it so many times over the last few years that she practically knew it by heart. The last picture posted had been posted a week ago, presumably right before he left for Wisconsin. It wasn’t anything she could get any information from, just a picture of their dogs.

She kept scrolling, saw pictures of the studio, of the view overlooking the canyon, a couple more of the dogs, of the grand piano standing proudly in a giant sun-soaked room with floor to ceiling windows looking out at the pool. Then there was a break, the months that Alex had been in rehab, and out of the past ten years it was those months that Isabelle wondered about the most. She scrolled further, saw less music and more nights out at the club and bottles of alcohol and selfies with Riley Rae Ritter. These were the pictures Isabelle studied, trying to figure out what Alex had been going through, what it was that had finally broken him.

And she knew that most of all, she was trying to figure out what brought him back here.

She practically threw her phone across the room when it started ringing and Alex’s name popped up on the screen. Once she figured out that she was blocked, she never tried to call or text him. But she figured that eventually she had been unblocked, because he had sent her one text in the past ten years, just a couple of days after she decided she was going to Northwestern. He must have heard about it from his mom or from Natalie or maybe he was stalking her social media as much as she was stalking his, because his text said “Congrats. I always knew you would be someone.”

Isabelle never answered. She wanted to, but she didn’t know what to say, and then as her life rolled forward and left her behind, when she ended up somewhere she didn’t want to be, she was too embarrassed to say anything to him, not when he was rich and famous and successful. She had no idea how to talk to that Alex.

“Hello?” she whispered.

“Hey.” His voice filled her ear, soft and warm and raspy. “I need to talk to you.”

“Okay. About what?” It could be any one of a hundred things. She didn’t know where they could even start.

“Come outside.” And he hung up with a click.

She knew without even asking that he was under the willow tree, making her way up to and pushing aside the long leaves. He had his back to the trunk, was cupping his hand to light a cigarette, the tip glowing orange in the pitch darkness. He looked up at her, turning his head to blow the smoke away from her. “You wanna sit?”

She sank down onto the grass, the ground cold under her sweatpants. “What’s going on?”

“I just…” He took another long drag off his cigarette. “I wanted to see you.”

A new flash of anger ran deep through Isabelle’s bones, settling in the pit of her stomach. They had barely talked all night, Isabelle sandwiched between Jackie and Madeline and trying not to look at him. After ten years, that was how he was going to start the conversation? “Why?” she snapped, more harshly than she meant to.

His mouth quirked up at the corners, and she caught a glimpse of the Alex that she used to know. “What’s been going on in your life?”

Isabelle exploded. “Are you fucking kidding me?” She grabbed the cigarette, even though he was in the middle of taking a big puff of it, stubbing it out on the bottom of her shoe. Even more infuriatingly, he looked like he was trying to hold back a smile. “You disappear for ten fucking years. I don’t hear from you once, not an I’m sorry, not an I miss you, not a oh hey, I moved to fucking L.A. but I’ll see you soon. Not one goddamn word, and now you’re gonna come back into my life, sit under my fucking tree, smoke your fucking cigarette, and ask me what’s new?”

Alex opened his mouth, but she barreled on.

“Why the hell did you even come back anyways?” She didn’t want for an answer, knowing that anything he said wouldn’t make her feel better. “Why don’t you go back to Los Angeles with your mansion and your dogs and your porn star girlfriend?”

“It’s not porn, Isabelle,” Alex snapped back, and she could tell he was finally mad, the easiness that he had carefully cultivated all night slipping back like a mask.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s… it’s… adult film,” he managed to get out, and she snorted. Riley Rae Ritter was one of the most viewed people on Pornhub, according to Twitter, and he was really going to sit here and try to play the semantics game about it. “What do you even know about it anyways?”

“What do I know about it?” Isabelle ripped a clump of grass out of the ground, shredding it between her fingers. “All I ever hear about is you, all over Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and I have to sit there and watch it all going down when you couldn’t even pick up the phone and explain what happened.” She knew she was dancing around the fact that he went to rehab, that there were so many questions she wanted the answer to, but if he didn’t bring it up, she sure as hell wasn’t going to.

“It’s not like I ever heard from you either,” he muttered.

“Fuck you, Alex,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth before she could even think about them. “I told you I loved you and next thing I know, you’ve moved halfway across the country and you blocked me. That’s a pretty clear message that you didn’t want me in your life.”

He stood up, grabbing his pack of cigarettes off the grass and shoving them in his back pocket. He looked down at her for a few seconds, and she couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “This is never what I wanted,” he said finally, and he left her sitting there in the grass wondering what the hell that meant.

_Hey little girl, it’s too much to take and the weight alone is enough to break_   
_You make it go away, I will follow you to the end of the world_   
_I Will Follow You by RIVVRS_

Zero.

That was what her student loan balance said.

On the eleventh of every month, Isabelle logged into the federal loan system to pay towards the exorbitant amount of money she owed on her student loans. Thankfully she wasn’t paying rent to her parents because otherwise there was no way in hell she would be able to afford it.

Last month, she had owed twenty-two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven dollars. And now it was saying she owed nothing.

She had been on hold for about ten minutes before her loan agent finally came back on the line. “Well,” he said. “I talked to my supervisor and it looks like your balance has been paid off. We sent you a letter when it happened.” She really needed to go through the stack of mail that she was letting pile up on her desk.

Isabelle pressed a knuckle to her forehead, trying to knead out the headache that she had woken up with. After screaming at Alex in her backyard last night, she had tossed and turned, unable to get to sleep as she played the scene in her head over and over again, trying to figure out what he meant, where they had gone wrong. “I’m sorry, what? I didn’t pay it off.”

“No,” her loan agent said, and she could hear papers rustling on the other end. “It was paid off by… one second, I have it here somewhere… It was paid off by Alexander Ludwig.”

Isabelle dropped the phone to the kitchen floor with a smash, and it took her a couple of seconds to realize that she should probably pick it up. “He… Wait. What?”

More papers rustled in the background. “He paid the remaining balance,” her loan agent said patiently, waiting for her to catch the hell up.

“When?”

There was another pause. “Two months ago?”

Two months ago. Two fucking months ago. She did the math in her head; two months ago Alex had just gotten out of rehab. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, thanks.” She hung up before he could say anything else.

God damn it. Now she really was going to have to talk to him.

_And it hits you when the lights go on, shit, maybe I miss you_   
_Just like that and I’m sober, I’m asking myself is it over_   
_Maybe I was lying when I told you, everything is great, everything is fucking great_   
_Miss You by Louis Tomlinson_

Of course, now that she needed to see him, she couldn’t find him anywhere.

He wasn’t answering any texts or calls, and he wasn’t at his parents’ house, something Isabelle was told when she finally got up the courage to walk over there and ask, just like she used to when they were fourteen years old and he was late meeting her to go to the pool or the movies or the Dairy Queen. There wasn’t much else in their tiny town, and she had no idea where he could be.

So she went to the bakery, like she usually did when she had a lot of nervous energy that she needed to burn out. “Hey,” Isabelle said to the girl working the counter as she breezed through the double doors to the kitchen where Leven was working, rolling out dough, cinnamon and sugar sitting in front of her.

Leven looked up as she burst through the doors. “Hey!” she said, elbow deep in dough. She didn’t stop working, kept kneading the dough in front of her, the muscles in her shoulders visible even underneath her t-shirt. “What are you doing here?”

Isabelle hopped up on the counter, knowing that her mom would kill her if she saw her doing this, and she leaned over, pinching a piece of the pile of dough and popping it in her mouth. “Mmm, good,” she said, swallowing. “I don’t know. Just needed to get out of the house.”

Leven frowned at her. “Liar. This is about Alex and you know it.”

Although Leven hadn’t ever met Alex either, she knew about as much as Jackie did, which was just about everything. The only thing that they didn’t know, in fact, was that Isabelle had told him that she loved him the night before he left. And now the student loan thing.

“Yeah,” she said, swinging her feet against the cabinets below her. “It sure is.”

“How was last night?”

“Well, which part?” Isabelle sighed. “The part where we barely spoke all night or the part where I ended up screaming at him at midnight in my backyard?” Leven still didn’t stop working, arching an eyebrow at her.

“You did what now?”

“It’s complicated. Or…” Isabelle took a deep breath, running the words through her head before she said them out loud. “The part where he paid off all twenty-five thousand dollars worth of my student loans.”

That got Leven to stop. She jerked back, her hands stilling. “He what?” she screeched, and Isabelle hoped that there was no one sitting in the cafe because there was a one hundred percent chance that they would have been able to hear Leven’s scream. Everyone in a two block radius probably heard Leven’s scream.

She shushed her quickly. “Technically he did it two months ago. But I just found out about it about ten minutes ago.”

Leven wiped her hands on her apron, pulling it off over her head and throwing it on one of the stainless steel tables lining the walls. “Come on,” she said, grabbing Isabelle’s hand and pulling her through the kitchen towards the back hallway and up the tiny stairs to the apartment she shared with Jackie.

“Lev, the bread-”

“Who fucking cares? This is way more important.” She shoved Isabelle down onto the window seat, sitting across from her and pulling her legs up so they could both fit. “Spill.”

“I know as much as you know,” Isabelle said, looking out the window. “I was trying to find him but I don’t…” She trailed off, watching people pass by on the street beneath them. It was just starting to cool down from the heat of summer, leaves falling from the trees and a chill running through the air, people digging out their sweaters and beanies. And then she saw Alex, the hood of his sweatshirt flipped up over his old Brewers hat, the one he used to wear every day when they were in high school, the one he left behind for Natalie when he moved. He was jogging down the street, moving slowly and winding around the people on the sidewalk.

“Gotta go.” Isabelle was off like a shot, through the door and down the stairs, leaving Leven behind in her confusion. She felt her stomach tighten into a knot, but she couldn’t stop, jumping down the last few steps and pushing through the back door into the alley where she could cut him off. He didn’t see her pop out onto the sidewalk, practically ran her over, but she managed to reach out, grab the sleeve of his sweatshirt and yank him into the alley.

“Oh my God,” he snapped at her, pulling his headphones out of his ears and letting them fall around his neck. “What the fuck, Isabelle? You do that in L.A. and you get punched.”

“We aren’t in L.A.,” she snapped back. “You were in L.A. and then you decided to come back here and ruin my life.”

“What are you talking about?” To his credit, he looked genuinely confused. He had never been good at lying to her. He had tried to a couple of times: when he lost his virginity during their sophomore year of high school, when he broke her iPod, when he planned a surprise party for her fifteenth birthday, but she always caught on, and he always broke down and told her the truth. Or at least he had. She realized now that he had kept the biggest lie of all time going when he went to audition for The X Factor without telling her.

“My student loans,” she said. It suddenly felt real, now that she was standing here talking to him about it, an the gravity of the situation hit her. To him, twenty-five thousand dollars wasn’t a lot of money. To Isabelle, it was years of payments, hours upon hours of work, a symbol of everything that she had given up to come home. It was a tangible reminder of the fact that she had derailed her own plan in a spectacular fashion.

“Oh.” Alex shrugged. He looked around, saw people staring at them as they passed, and he pulled her into the doorway to the stairwell, hidden from view. “Yeah. That.”

“I can’t… You can’t… You have to undo it.”

“I can’t,” he said, repeating her words and shrugging again. She was going to kill him. “It’s done.”

“It’s done? It can’t just be done.”

Alex looked behind her, and she knew without even turning around that someone was going to see Alex, come up and ask for a picture or an autograph. She sighed loudly, twisting the doorknob and pushing him into the hallway at the back of the bakery. They had spent hours in the upstairs apartment together, back when it was just her mom’s office. She used to watch them up there when they were little, settling them on a blanket with their toys as she worked.

“I figured…” The mask slipped again, and for a moment, Isabelle saw the Alex she used to know. “I figured it was the least that I owed you. The very least.”

The air got heavy around them when he fell silent, and she didn’t know what to say, wouldn’t have been able to speak even if she had. That was the closest he had ever gotten to acknowledging that he fucked up, that things hadn’t gone the way they should, and she didn’t want to say anything for fear that she would ruin the moment.

Isabelle had realized last night that she would never be able to be close to Alex again, even if that’s what he wanted. She couldn’t look at him without seeing him disappear again. If she put herself in that situation, if she let herself open up and be his friend, even if he apologized and explained everything, she would always be waiting for him to leave.

She had spent the last ten years trying to run from her problems, but all of her running had just brought her right back home: right back to the bakery, right back to this town, and eventually right back here, standing across from Alex and trying to figure him out.

Alex flipped his hood down, biting his bottom lip, waiting for her to say something. “I don’t want your money,” she said finally. “All I ever wanted was an explanation.”

“Okay,” he said quickly. “Let me buy you a coffee and I’ll explain everything.”

He held out his hand to her, and she flashed back to all of the times in her life that she had jumped into something with only Alex to guide her. She had always trusted him explicitly, until suddenly she couldn’t anymore. But she needed this explanation, more than she needed anything.

“Okay.” She took his hand, his palm warm against hers. “Let’s go.”

_In all the good times I find myself longing for change and in the bad times I fear myself_   
_Tell me something boy, aren’t you tired of trying to fill that void_   
_Shallow by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper_

Leven didn’t look up when Isabelle came back through the kitchen, up to her arms in dough again. “Where the fuck did you-”

Isabelle cut her off quickly before she could say something embarrassing. “Lev, this is Alex.”

Her mouth dropped open, and for the second time in fifteen minutes, Isabelle had managed to stun her out of her work. “Oh my God, you are,” she said, trying to surreptitiously shoot Isabelle a what-the-fuck look and failing miserably. “It’s nice to meet you, I’ve…” She trailed off, clearly not wanting to end the sentence with “I’ve heard so much about you,” even though her meaning was clear.

Alex reached over the table to shake her hand, nonplussed by the flour that coated every surface. “It’s nice to meet you too,” he said easily. Isabelle watched him carefully. This Alex wasn’t her Alex; this was the Alex who had done years of networking and meeting famous people and being able to fit into a space that he wasn’t used to and make it look easy. “I’ve seen you on Instagram,” he said, shooting Isabelle a sideways look, his words confirmation that he checked up on her social media as much as she did with him.

Leven actually blushed, and Isabelle was going to have to remember to give her shit for that later. “We’re going to go sit down,” Isabelle said, wanting to rush Alex out of there as quickly as possible before somebody did something to embarrass her. “Yell for me if you need me.” She followed Alex out of the kitchen, turning around at the last second to shrug at Leven. She knew that she would be bombarded with a million and one questions later, and she wasn’t at all sure that she would have any answers.

Alex was already settling himself into table in the corner by the fireplace. That had always been their table; they had sat there every day after school doing homework and flicking pieces of paper at each other when they got bored. He had written their names in permanent marker on the underside of the table one day. She knew they were still there.

She stopped at the counter, filling up two mugs with coffee and handing one to him as she came up behind him. “I don’t know how you take it,” she said, hating that there were so many things she didn’t know about him anymore.

“Black is good,” he said, taking a big sip with complete disregard for the fact that it was a fresh pot and burning hot. “So…” He sat back. “What do you want to know first?”

There were a hundred things she wanted to ask him, and she had no idea where to start. Why did he go to rehab? Why had he left his girlfriend and his dog and his life in Los Angeles to come back here? Why had he left in the first place? Did he think about her as much as she thought about him? Could she have said anything to make him stay?

She decided to start at the beginning. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Isabelle didn’t have to clarify her question; Alex knew exactly what she was talking about. “First of all,” he said. “I just want to make sure you know that I never meant to hurt you. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Obviously I fucked that up.” A muscle in his jaw twitched as he swallowed, looking down. “I guess at first I didn’t think I would make it. And then I did, and the only thing I wanted to do was tell you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t. I guess…” Alex had always been infuriatingly slow at trying to figure out what he wanted to say, choosing every word carefully. Isabelle, on the other hand, spit out everything she was thinking the second she thought it, something that they had argued about many times in the past. “I wanted to make you proud. I wanted to do something that would make me worthy of being your… your friend.” He stuttered over the words. “And I was scared that I would fail.”

The fear of failure had always been Alex’s worst enemy, and it was always Isabelle telling him to go for things, to do everything that he was scared of, to get back up again even if he did screw up. Ironic, then, that he was the one who had gotten out. “You didn’t even tell me after you left,” she said, blinking back the tears that still came to her eyes whenever she remembered the feeling that had settled in the pit of her stomach when she called him from Madeline’s phone, confirming her hunch that he had blocked her. “You did worse than that,” she said, gripping onto her coffee cup to stop her hands from shaking. “You shut me out.”

“It got away from me.” Alex shook his head. “That’s not an excuse. None of this is, I swear. I felt shitty for not telling you, and then I got anxious that I hadn’t told you, and then before I knew it I was leaving and it had snowballed into this big thing and…” He moved his hand on the table, and she thought he was going to reach out and touch her, but he didn’t. “I was sixteen. I was immature and scared. And if you had asked me to come back, I would have in a heartbeat.”

Isabelle knew her next question wasn’t appropriate, thought about skipping over it, but she had to know the answer. “You didn’t leave because I said that… because I told you I loved you? Because we kissed?”

“No.” Alex answered faster than a heartbeat, like he had been waiting a long time for her to ask that question. “Absolutely not.”

She wanted to ask him if he had felt the same way, if things would have been different if he stayed, but she didn’t. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer, and she didn’t want to slip up and tell him that she had never gotten over him, that he had been the one for her for her entire life and that hadn’t changed just because he had left. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t, not with Riley Rae Ritter in the picture.

“Rehab,” she blurted out, not wanting to ask about the girlfriend yet. “I… You…”

Alex sighed deeply, something flashing across his eyes that she couldn’t read. “I’m an alcoholic,” he said evenly, and she could tell that he had said those words dozens, maybe hundreds of times in recent months. “There were some drugs and stuff too, but for me it was always alcohol.” She bit her lip to keep from saying something, wanting to let him tell the story in his own way.

“I was so young,” he continued. “When the show aired and when I signed my contract, I was still a baby. And there were all these parties and people and…” He trailed off. “I got in over my head, and by the time I realized I had a problem it was just too late. And I did the same thing I always did where I pushed it aside and ignored it.”

“So what changed?”

There was a long pause, Alex contemplating his next words carefully. “Natalie came out to visit a few months ago. I think at that point everyone knew I had a problem. I was blacking out every single night, showing up to the studio hungover or still drunk, not putting out good music or any music for that matter.” He looked up at her. “I had to get better, not just for me but my family, for my parents and Nat and Nick and Sophia and…” He trailed off, and she realized that Riley Rae Ritter was not on that list. “I’ve been clean for just over sixty days,” he said, pushing something across the table towards her, and she realized it was his chip, picking it up and turning it over in her hands.

Isabelle felt like she had more questions than she had started with. She didn’t want to picture the Alex she had grown up with doing drugs or drinking so much that he passed out. She didn’t want to think of him hurting, feeling alone or abandoned, trying to forget.

“I came back because I was worried I would relapse,” he continued. “They tell you that it gets rough around ninety days and I thought… I don’t know, I thought maybe coming back here would be different.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” he said. “But there are different demons here.”

“Yeah.” Isabelle didn’t know what to make of that. “I suppose there are.”

“Look.” Alex leaned across the table, this time grabbing her hand. “Your student loans… I’m not taking that money back. I don’t care if you hate me for it. You were always the one telling me that I could do anything, and I honestly… I don’t think I would have anything if it wasn’t for you. I want you to have that same feeling. So you’re just going to suck it up.” For the first time in their conversation, she felt a smile crack her face.

She wanted to ask about his girlfriend, knew that if they were going to be friends she should at least pretend to be interested in how long they had been together and how they met and whether she was okay with him being back here, but she couldn’t do it.

“Nothing I can say will make anything I did right,” Alex said, squeezing her fingers. “But I promise you, I’m going to try anyways.”

“For what it’s worth,” she said. “I really am glad that you came back.”

He smiled at her, the same smile she was used to, the one like sunshine that made her feel like she was the most important thing in his world, in the entire world. “Good,” he said. “Because you’re not getting rid of me.”

_Now that we’re cool, we can just chill, we can be friends_   
_The problem with that is I’ve gotten in over my head, I can’t think about anybody but you_   
_Sugar by Karmin_

They had a whole lot of lost time to make up for.

Over the next few weeks, they spent every waking hour together and some of the sleeping ones too. Alex would come into the bakery when he finished his run in the morning, usually around seven thirty, and he would sit by the window drinking coffee and working on something on his computer until she got off at one o’clock.

Then she would join him or they would go down to the lake or sit underneath the tree in Isabelle’s backyard. And they talked about everything.

Everything that had happened while they had been apart. Everything that they had missed while they were too busy being stubborn.

Isabelle told Alex about school, about how she had gotten there and moved into her dorm and gone to classes and spent days, weeks, months, eventually a couple of years feeling like a fraud. She told him that she thought that she could never measure up to who she was supposed to be because she didn’t even know who that was. He told her that she didn’t have to be who she was supposed to be; she could just be who she was.

She told him that it broke her heart to even think about dropping out of school, but that she hadn’t seen any other way to change her life, to change the feeling in the pit of her stomach that was there from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to sleep.

Alex told her that sometimes he hated not being able to walk down the street without someone taking a picture of him or stopping to talk to him. Sometimes he just wanted to be able to go buy a gallon of milk without it being put in a magazine. He said that being in Los Angeles had been the loneliest time of his life, even when he was surrounded by people and parties and fast cars and girls. He said that he had never been able to tell who liked him for him or who just wanted something.

He told her that he had had his first drink at sixteen, the night he signed his contract. He made it through releasing his first album and going on the first tour where he was just a headliner without falling too deeply into it, smoking pot every now and then and having a beer to relax when he got onto the tour bus at the end of the night.

He said that he started drinking a lot while he was working on his second album, and that when he went on tour again he blacked out almost every night. He told her that there were entire days and weeks of his lives that he didn’t remember. He said that everyone expected him to be the life of the party, to do the crazy things and have the big stories and be someone he wasn’t. She repeated his own words back to him: “You don’t have to be who you’re supposed to be. You can just be who you are.”

He told her that he had been forced into taking a break after his second tour. His handlers knew that it was in over his head but nobody wanted to tell him that. So instead he was told to relax, to enjoy his early twenties, to catch up on the life that he had missed. He released a lot of singles with other artists, went to a lot of parties, and did a lot of coke.

“But why?” Isabelle asked him one night. They were stretched out underneath the willow tree, the stars just visible through the long tendrils of leaves that brushed the ground. She felt the same familiar twinge in her stomach that ached every time he talked about being an addict. She wished more than anything that she had been in his life, that maybe she could have done something, could have been there for him.

“I don’t know.” He rolled over onto his side, tracing his finger around her wrist, around the place where her friendship bracelet used to be. She had kept it on for months after he left, finally cutting it off, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. It had come in a box with her to Northwestern, and now it lived in the drawer of her nightstand. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I guess I just felt like I was losing control so quickly. I knew I needed to do something, but I didn’t know what.”

He talked about his third album, and she questioned him about all of the lyrics that scared her. “I’m in a really different place now,” he said. “But I’m glad it’s out there because I don’t want to forget what I went through to get here.”

Isabelle wondered a lot where Riley Rae Ritter was in all of this, if she had noticed Alex changing or if she came along after things had gotten bad. He mentioned her sometimes, usually pretty brief and vague. She finally worked up the nerve to ask him about her. He told her that he had met her through mutual friends; yes, he had known she was a porn star; no, it was just his name on the title of the house but she was staying there now while he was back home.

She wanted to ask him if he was going to propose, but she knew that if the answer was yes, she wouldn’t be able to hide whatever she was feeling. All of the articles she had seen reported that because she had stayed with Alex during his months at rehab, he was planning on marrying him sooner rather than later. That didn’t sound like Alex to her.

“What about you?” he asked easily. They were in his childhood bedroom; she was sitting cross-legged on the floor looking through his old high school yearbook. “Boyfriend?”

“Have you noticed anyone hanging around?” She stuck her tongue out at him, flipping a page. She was trying to find one specific picture of him, back from their freshman year when he was just a scrawny little kid who refused to wear anything but plaid. Her plan was to keep it and tweet it out as blackmail when she needed to. Alex was lying on his stomach on the bed above her, and she knew he was fully prepared to rip the yearbook out of her hand before she could pull out her phone. He knew her too well.

“I thought maybe you’ve been sneaking out to see him at night,” he said. “Can’t bring him around and all, since obviously he wouldn’t measure up to me.”

He said it jokingly, but she knew he was right. In all of her past relationships, all of her failed first dates and ex-boyfriends and one night stands, no one had ever felt like Alex. She had realized early on that she was doomed, that no one else had known her for her entire life.

Isabelle told him that she didn’t want to run the bakery for the rest of her life, that she liked it for now but she couldn’t do it forever. “So what do you want to do?” They were at a movie, the theater empty around them since it was two o’clock in the afternoon, and they were doing more talking than watching.

“Hell if I know.” She threw a piece of popcorn at him, and he leaned back to catch it in his mouth, sticking his tongue out at her. “If I did, I wouldn’t be here.”

“But you’re great at loads of stuff.”

“I’m good at stuff. I’m good at baking. I’m good at writing. I’m good at bags and untangling necklaces and memorizing random lines from The Office. I’m not great at anything, not the way that you or Madeline or Natalie are.”

He wouldn’t drop it, bringing the conversation back up again when they were at dinner that night. “You have to start somewhere,” Alex said, smiling at the waitress who brought them their drinks. “Literally anywhere.”

“Easy for you to say.” Isabelle shrugged, fully aware of the fact that everyone in the restaurant seemed to be looking their way. They had driven to Milwaukee for dinner, and Alex had already been approached about a dozen times. “You’re the best at something.”

“Oh, really?” He leaned back in his chair, shooting that grin at her that he always wore when he was being a smart-ass. “You think I’m the best?”

“Yeah, the best at having a big head.” She rolled her eyes, and he laughed.

It finally felt like things were back to normal, like he was her best friend again. They had somehow managed to catch up on the last ten years in just a few weeks, but the one thing that they had avoided was the fact that Alex didn’t live here anymore, that at some point he was going to have to leave and go back to his real life.

She certainly wasn’t ready for that.

_Since we met I feel a lightness in my step, you’re miles away but I still feel you_   
_Anywhere I go there you are_   
_Fire and the Flood by Vance Joy_

It felt like he had only been home for a couple of days, even though it had been just over a month. The end came too quickly.

It was different this time, now that she knew Alex was leaving. Isabelle drove him to the airport in Minneapolis, wanting to drag out their time together as long as she could, wanted to wait until the very last possible minute to say goodbye.

“It’s not goodbye,” Alex told her as she pulled into an empty spot in the parking ramp. “I’ll see you soon.”

She put the car in park, turning to look at him and trying not to cry, although she had been a complete mess for the last couple of days. They were down at the lake, sitting on the dock when Alex told her that he had to go back.

“Already?” He had his arm slung around her shoulder, like they were still sixteen years old and her heart didn’t beat out of her chest every time he touched her. He was warm against her side, the cool September breeze blowing across the tiny lake and running across them. “But you just got here.”

“I know,” Alex said, looking down, and she couldn’t read the expression on his face in the darkness. “I wish I didn’t have to, but I’ve gotta get back to work.”

Isabelle didn’t know what to say. It had crossed her mind a lot in the last few weeks that if he left again, she wouldn’t see him for a while. It wouldn’t be ten years, of course, but it would be a while. Now that she finally had him back she didn’t think she could let go again. She couldn’t sit there while he walked away again. She couldn’t stay up nights wondering where he was or how he was, whether he missed her so much his chest felt tight.

“You’ll come see me, right?”

“If you want me to,” she said, her heart jumping at the words.

“Of course,” he said. “I have so much to show you.”

He reminded her of that as they made their way into the airport, weaving around people, both of them walking as slowly as they could to delay the inevitable. Alex was wearing his usual airport getup, hat pulled low, sweatshirt hood up, headphones slung around his neck, but people were still pointing at him, whispering, coming up and asking for pictures. He was really something, giving everyone at least a few seconds and making them all feel like they were the most important person in the world at that moment. Isabelle knew that feeling well, couldn’t resent them for it, but all she wanted to do was grab his hand and hold on tight.

Far too soon, they reached the security checkpoint, and Alex dropped his bag to the ground, pulling Isabelle towards him before she could say anything. When they were younger, they were always touching each other, sharing the same bed, sitting on each other when there weren’t enough seats at movie night, wrestling in the kitchen when Alex took the last Pop Tart. Now that they were adults and Alex had a girlfriend, Isabelle was always conscious to keep some space between them. But now, he held her tight, his heart beating against hers, his arms warm around her, holding onto her like he would never let her go. She didn’t dare move a muscle for fear that he might disappear.

Finally, he pulled back, swallowing visibly and looking down at her. She reached up, running her fingers across his cheeks and wiping away the wetness, well aware that she was crying too.

They had stayed up late last night, both of them stretched out on Isabelle’s bed, not minding that it certainly wasn’t big enough for both of them. The lights that she had strung up on the walls twinkled around them, and Netflix played silently in the background. Alex was propped up on his side, looking down at her. Neither of them wanted to fall asleep first, not wanting to give up their last moments together.

“What time is it?” Isabelle asked, fighting to keep her eyes open, and Alex glanced over her shoulder at her alarm clock.

“Three fifteen,” he said, his voice raspy from both the late night and the hours of talking that had led up to it.

“We should go to sleep,” she said. “We have to be up in four hours.”

“You first,” he said, dropping his head down onto her shoulder and shoving his face into her neck, his breath tickling her skin as it ghosted across her.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“Me either.”

Now he trailed his hands up her back, hooking his fingers behind her neck, and she reached up, grabbing onto his wrists, willing him silently to stay with her. She wasn’t going to ask him not to go, but she couldn’t speak because those were the words sitting heavy on her tongue. “I love you, Isabelle,” he said softly, so quietly that she could barely hear it. “I’ll think about you every second.”

Isabelle closed her eyes. “Promise?”

“I promise,” he said. “But especially at three fifteen in the morning when I can’t sleep and I wish I was with you.”

It took every ounce of willpower she had in her to push him away, to take a step back. They had already discussed the formalities the night before: he would call her whenever he needed her, no matter what time it was or what he thought she might be doing; she would go to see him soon, as soon as she could her work schedule figured out; he would be back for Thanksgiving and Christmas. All that was left was for him to get on that plane.

“I love you too,” she said, her voice shaking, and she bit her bottom lip to stop herself from losing it completely. “Be safe.”

He nodded. “Always.”

And just like that, he was gone.

_When life leaves you high and dry, I’ll be at your door tonight if you need help_   
_I’ll shut down the city lights, I’ll lie, cheat, I’ll beg, and bribe to make you well_   
_When enemies are at your door I’ll carry you away from more if you need help_   
_Your hope dangling by a string, I’ll share in your suffering to make you well_   
_Give me reasons to believe that you would do the same for me_   
_And I would do it for you, baby I’m not moving on, I’ll love you long after you’re gone_   
_Gone, Gone, Gone by Phillip Phillips_

“He’s gorgeous,” Leven said, Jackie nodding along intently, and Isabelle just rolled her eyes, trying to suppress the smile that threatened to slide across her face every time someone brought up Alex in casual conversation. Although this conversation was far from casual.

“Yeah. I guess,” she said, shrugging like she had never noticed it before and picking a piece of pepperoni off the top of her pizza. “I mean, he’s like my brother at this point.”

“He most certainly is not,” Jackie said immediately, not even giving Isabelle a chance to try to believe her own lie. “You’re in love with him.”

Isabelle wasn’t even going to try to lie to her. She knew it. Jackie knew it. Leven knew it. Everyone knew it apparently, except for Alex. “Okay, so what?”

“So what?” Leven asked incredulously, rolling towards her. They were sprawled on the giant fluffy rug in the middle of their apartment, pizza boxes spread out between them and The Bachelor playing on the television in the background. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.” Isabelle hitched a shoulder up, avoiding their eyes and picking up her phone to see another text from Alex. Since he had landed in Los Angeles that afternoon, he had been texting her nonstop, bringing a smile to her face every time she picked up her phone to see his name. “He has a girlfriend.”

“And again I say, so what?” Leven asked grumpily. “You’re his soulmate.”

Leven and Jackie had bombarded Isabelle with questions after she and Alex made up, about all the things he had said to her and how she felt and whether there was anything going on that they should know about. Isabelle was glad to have them; given that they hadn’t known her and Alex back when they were Isabelle and Alex, they had an outside perspective.

“So you just forgave him?” Jackie had asked after Isabelle had had that first conversation with Alex in the cafe. “Just like that?”

“Honestly, I think I forgave him a long time ago,” she said. “We all have our own shit. And underneath all of it… I don’t know. He’s still Alex.”

“We saw you with him,” Jackie said now. “We saw you fall in love. You’re going to just let him walk away?”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Go get him!”

“Yes.” Jackie sat up, her eyes lighting up. “We’ll come with. Girls’ trip to California!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Isabelle held her hands up. “No one is going anywhere, and we all need to calm down.”

They backed off after that, as much as the two of them knew how, but Isabelle knew that they were always dying to bring it up again, to try to convince her to go after what she wanted, for once in her fucking life. Maybe she was just projecting.

But she had thought about it a lot, especially the night before Alex left. She had laid there next to him at three o’clock in the morning, the air between them heavy with all the things that neither of them would say. She wanted to tell him everything: that she was still in love with him, that she had probably never stopped being in love with him, that life could be a bitch but they would get through it together, that it didn’t matter what had happened over the past ten years because they had all of this right now.

And she didn’t.

She did the same thing she always did: backed down, gave up, quit. She had quit on her friendship with Alex; she had quit on school; she had quit trying to do anything more than what had always been expected of her. And now she was quitting on this too.

But every time she started to open her mouth, every time a word was sitting there on the tip of her tongue, every time she was ready to close her eyes and jump, she remembered that he wasn’t her Alex. Sure, when he was back here in their tiny hometown he was, but he had a girlfriend. He had a career. He had a life. He had responsibilities and contracts and commitments that went far beyond anything she could offer him. She couldn’t be a rockstar’s girlfriend. So here she would stay, and if that meant that she would always wonder what would have been, then that was fine. She could live with that.

Isabelle convinced herself of that over the next few weeks, telling herself that she was happy in her own life. She told herself that when she woke up in the morning to see FaceTime still open, Alex fast asleep on the other end. She told herself that when new pictures of him and Riley Rae Ritter popped up on her Twitter, the two of them photographed at some restaurant in West Hollywood. She told herself that every time he asked when she was coming to visit, dropped hints that the holidays in Los Angeles were beautiful. She told herself that when she made excuses, told him she didn’t know if she could get away when the bakery was that busy.

She was lying to herself. She knew that she didn’t know how to live in a world where he wasn’t the one for her.

_Sugar stay in my eyes, I’ve been looking for you my whole life,_   
_Sugar you’re right on time, I’ve been waiting for you my whole life_   
_Sugar, You by Oh Honey_

It was November first, and Alex was due to come home in just a couple of weeks. They had both been counting the days; Alex had already gotten his plane ticket. He got extra cagey when she asked him if his girlfriend would be coming back with him, changing the subject, but Isabelle didn’t see how they could avoid it forever.

“You have the day off tomorrow, right? Got any big plans?” he had asked her the night before on FaceTime, ducking out of the Halloween party he was at and sliding into a dark room, closing the door behind him before he turned on the lights.

“Sleep in,” she said, shrugging. “Do laundry. Catch up on Shameless. Not as glamorous as your plans, I’m sure.”

He cleared his throat, biting his lip. “I wish I was there with you. Or that you were here with me. Or that we were together anywhere.”

“I know.” She looked down, not wanting to meet his eyes. “Me too.”

It was conversations like these that made her even more confused, conversations like these that made her want to drop everything and fly out to see him. She needed to keep a firm grasp on reality, as much as she could. There was a loud burst of noise behind him. “I’d better…” He nodded towards the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said quickly. “You go. Call me tomorrow.”

Isabelle tossed and turned for a while that night, ended up falling asleep a little before four o’clock, when she would normally be heading to work, incredibly thankful that she had the day off.

The sun was high in the sky when the door to her room flew open, hitting the wall with a thud, high pitched shrieking filling the room, and she bolted upright, wide awake and glancing at the clock. It was noon, which didn’t explain why Jackie and Leven were currently screaming at her and not at the bakery.

“Did you hear it?”

“What are you talking about?” Isabelle groaned, falling back against her pillows and tossing her arm over her eyes, trying to shield them from the sun streaming in the windows.

“Alex’s new song!”

She popped her eyes open, sitting up again. “What new song?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

Leven threw herself across Isabelle’s bed, grabbing her laptop off the desk and elbowing her in the ribs in the process. The few seconds it took for Leven to pull up Isabelle’s Spotify were some of the longest of her life. Alex told her everything, or at least so she thought, but he hadn’t mentioned one damn word about releasing a song today.

She bit her lip as Leven pressed play, Alex’s voice coming over the speakers of her computer.

_Lying next to you, I got a flight in the morning, got me questioning what I think is important_   
_I can’t even lie, think of you when I’m with her, look me in my eye, tell me that you feel different_   
_Flew four hours just to stay the night with you, haven’t seen you in ten years but I still get you_   
_Hurts to see you laugh cause I know I’ll fucking miss that, how could I forget that_   
_You made me feel alive_   
_Forget them other girls, I will put them to the side_   
_Girls in L.A. couldn’t be more dry_   
_You’re so money, baby, you ain’t even have to try_   
_Now I’m running with you round our hometown_   
_All up in your room, the world drowned out_   
_It’s a quarter after three saying everything we mean_   
_Girl it’s hard to see me go so fast, yeah, I get that, times that we have so wild can’t forget that_   
_Now I’m on a flight in my feelings, thinking about you, hope you know you fire, fuck anyone who doubts you_   
_Life out in Cali has been great, I’m committed, you the only thing that makes me wish things were different_   
_I might fly you out, get your ass on a one way if I had it my way_   
_Maybe I’m stuck in the past, girl, not willing to let it all go, you can’t ignore the fact, baby_   
_For a moment I was feeling like I had you, didn’t want to leave but I had to_   
_It’s a quarter after three saying everything we mean_

There were a solid fifteen seconds of silence after the song ended, so many thoughts running through Isabelle’s head that she couldn’t decide what to say first. Jackie beat her to the punch. “Isabelle. That’s about you. He wrote that for you.”

Her first thought was that of course, that wasn’t true. But she knew it was, and as Leven played it a second time, things jumped out at her. _I got a flight in the morning. Think of you when I’m with her. Haven’t seen you in ten years but I still get you. Running with you round our hometown. On a flight in my feelings._

Quarter after three.

She remembered the night before Alex had left, remembered asking him what time it was, remembered him telling her the next morning that he would think of her at three fifteen when he was lonely and wished he was with her.

“Tell her,” Leven muttered to Jackie. “Tell her the rest.”

“What? What’s the rest?”

“It’s not just this song,” Jackie said carefully. “The whole album dropped today.”

“What?” Isabelle knew she was repeating herself over and over again, but nothing they were saying was making sense. Alex had told her last week that he had just started working on it, that it wouldn’t be out until next summer at the earliest. Leven turned the laptop towards her, showing her the screen, and she almost threw up.

The album was called Isabelle.

She grabbed her phone, but there was nothing from him. Normally he texted her when he woke up, but the screen was blank, just the picture of her and Leven and Jackie out on the boat that she had as her background. Her hands were shaking as she pulled up her favorites.

Alex answered Isabelle. “Hey,” he said, and he sounded hesitant. “What’s up?”

“I heard it,” she blurted out, not bothering with any pleasantries. “It’s… I… You…”

Alex didn’t need her to finish even one of those sentences. “It’s for you, Isabelle.” He took a deep breath. “It’s always been you.”

_I can hear you calling out_   
_Through breakdowns and hard luck you hold my head up, no matter where I roam_   
_Every wrong turn and back road, you share my highs and lows_   
_And now my heart’s coming home_   
_Heart’s Coming Home by Castro_

They landed in Los Angeles that night, and Alex was there at LAX to pick them up.

“Listen,” he had told her on the phone. “I have a lot to explain, a lot I want to tell you, but I want to do it in person.” He pulled the phone away from his ear, and she could hear him saying something to his assistant. “If I get you a plane ticket for tonight, will you come?”

Jackie and Leven were staring at Isabelle wide-eyed and breathless, and she knew they were dying to know what he was saying.

“But your girlfriend…”

“She hasn’t been my girlfriend for a long time,” Alex said, and she practically choked on a breath. “Not since before I went to rehab.”

“I… What?”

“I’ll explain it all,” he said. “I promise.”

“Okay.” Isabelle closed her eyes. This was the moment she could change her own life. This was the moment she could take control. She just had to jump. “Okay. I’ll come tonight.”

Leven and Jackie let out screams, Leven grabbing the phone from Isabelle and shrieking wordlessly at Alex. A few hours later, they were all on Delta flight number 1771 together. It was only a couple of hours long, but Isabelle still managed to drive Jackie crazy because she couldn’t sit still, bouncing her leg up and down until Jackie practically slapped her to get her to stop.

It felt like it took forever to get off the plane and away from the gate and towards the security exit. Isabelle caught a glimpse of Alex behind the glass, biting his lip nervously just like he always did, but when he saw her he broke into a huge grin, pushing his way through the crowd, and she dropped her bag, leaving it behind for Leven to grab.

She ran towards him, and for the first time in her life she didn’t overthink things, didn’t worry about what might happen, didn’t let her head get in the way of her feelings, not even giving him a chance to say hello before she pulled him down towards her and kissed him. It didn’t matter that there were dozens of people around, that paparazzi were right outside, that her two best friends were somewhere behind her. For now it was just the two of them, his hands tight around her waist, his breath falling warm on her face as she finally pulled back, looking up at you.

“Well,” he said, his breath hitching in his throat. “It’s about time.”

That night, after he showed them around his house, Jackie and Leven practically apoplectic at the number of bedrooms and the rain shower in one of the guest bathrooms and the giant pool in the backyard, they disappeared, leaving her and Alex alone in the giant house. “Come on,” he said, pulling her by the hand out to the pool, overlooking the city, the Hollywood sign visible in the distance. “Best view in the house.”

He had been unable to stop touching her since she got there, his hand lingering on her back or his fingers laced through hers or his lips pressed against the top of her head. It had all happened so fast that she was expecting to wake up at any moment, to realize that this was all just a dream, but sitting here with him now she finally felt like she could relax.

Alex slung his arm over her shoulder, sitting down at the edge of the pool and pulling her down with him. It was dark, the city lights bright beneath them, and it felt like she was sitting at the top of the world. They talked for hours. Alex told her that he had broken up with Riley Rae Ritter before he went to rehab, that she had been staying in house until she could find somewhere to stay, that the paparazzi had gotten those pictures of them from a few weeks ago when they met up so she could give him back his keys. He told her that he had started working on the album when he was in rehab, that he knew even then that it was going to be about her. He told her that the reason he came back home was to see her, to see if he could fix what he had broken. He told her that he had written 3:15 on the plane after he had left her.

“I always knew you were the one I wanted,” he said. “And I realized the second I left that I don’t want to spend another minute being away from you.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?”

Alex shrugged, grinning down at her. “You know I love being dramatic.”

“You can say that again.”

“But you love me.”

She looked up at him, his face lit up by the pool lights. “Always,” she said softly. “No matter what.” They still had so much to talk about, a lot to figure out, big plans and little details and everything in between to iron out, but they also had an entire lifetime to do it. And if there was anything the past few months had taught her, it was that the craziest things could happen if you just let go and jumped. He kissed her with the moon shining overhead and their entire lives stretching out in front of them, and she knew it didn’t matter if they were in Wisconsin or California or anywhere else in the world as long as he was by her side. He whispered the words into her ear, tracing them into her neck and murmuring them into her hair over and over and over: I’ll never leave you.

There was a whole lot of history behind them, and Isabelle couldn’t wait to see what came next.

_And if the sun’s upset and the sky goes cold_   
_Then if the clouds get heavy and start to fall_   
_I really need somebody to call my own, I wanna be somebody to someone, someone to you_   
_Someone To You by BANNERS_

**Author's Note:**

> i gave alex a lot of really great lyrics written by a lot of really great people, but especially 3:15 by bazzi. fic playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/mandaestella/playlist/2JFUo1oPSaJrpVcEtjMdJ1?si=XMawf2SuT2aB-AXomAVnzg


End file.
